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> This was less disruptive than taking 30 minutes (less than 3 minutes per person) for the daily standup, which often dragged to 45 minutes and sometimes even a

> This was less disruptive than taking 30 minutes (less than 3 minutes per person) for the daily standup, which often dragged to 45 minutes and sometimes even an entire hour! More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups. If you have standups daily, you should be able to give an update on what your status is in a minute tops, given it's business as usual. If there's any followup discussions to be had or questions to be resolved, the startup is not the right place to do that, everyone who is interested or affected can continue the discussion after the standup. This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask. Having spent some time living in Sweden, the situation described in the article is not too surprising to me. Swedes are incredibly nonconfrontational and even the thought of politely cutting someone off because they're talking too much in a standup would be faux pas for some.

piva00 1y ago
Not my experience working in Sweden for the past 10+ years. Likely that I had outlier experiences here but standups have always been short, the person leading it had complete autonomy to call out "I think this should be discussed after stand-up" whenever some discussion started to go on for a little longer (usually about 2-3 minutes is too long). The thing I noticed being culturally different is that you just don't cut off someone while they're speaking, you raise your point by politely asking for the space and sharing your opinion, and decisions about it are made through some consensus (which never failed when a discussion is going on for too long).
- mcv 1y ago
  It's definitely possible that culture matters. I wonder if there's something about American work culture that makes their standups so often dysfunctional. I'm Dutch and I have pretty good experiences with them in most projects.
cweld510 1y ago
Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t working on the same things. The only real solution to that is to get people talking outside the standup.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Turns out that when you already have a meeting scheduled every single day, people (except for a few) just stop seeking each outer at other times. As much as this looks like a good thing superficially, dailies aren't fit for solving any kind of coordination problem, and that's the only meeting you will get.
deleted 1y ago
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cainxinth 1y ago
> More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups. One of my clients hired a former U.S. Marine. I so enjoyed attending the meetings he ran. He managed the clock with ruthless efficiency.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Tangent: Way back when I was in Scouts, the scout master was a USN missile submarine captain. He was a quirky guy, not the least of which was his ability to schedule things to ridiculous levels of detail... cross-country trip to go backpacking, and he'd have a lunch stop at 13:14, gas stop at 17:29, on base (we would stay in open barracks at military bases across the country) by 16:09. And wouldn't you know it... we were usually within a few minutes either way. And he managed to pack a lot of side-trips/value into the days we were on the road. It was really wild.
  - pc86 1y ago
    I would never suggest people join the military to learn how to run a schedule correctly, but I will say that it's hard to find someone who was in the military - and borderline impossible to find someone who was senior in the military, especially a senior NCO - who is habitually late.
  - harrall 1y ago
    I once did an international camping and backpacking trip like this where we had everything down to a minute. The key is to check your watch after you complete any activity. For example, you read that a 1000ft climb hike takes 2 hours and you do it in 2.5 hours. Do this over months and you gain the ability to make perfect estimates. Turns out that feedback loops are useful. Also applies to all other skills. Funny thing is I’m mostly a buy tickets to fly next week and wing it kind of person but I wanted to try it one time for kicks. Winging it is a whole different set of skills. Get good at both and planning becomes your jam.
- watwut 1y ago
  One problem with efficiently running standups is that ... they are the most useless meeting in the world. It is short, ok, but nothing whatsoever would change if it did not happened.
imiric 1y ago
From my experience as a SWE over the past ~15 years working in teams ranging from 10+ engineers in large companies doing daily in-person standups, to ~5 engineers in small remote-first companies doing daily videocall or async standups, and everything in between: the standup ceremony is a waste of everyone's time. Its only purpose is social/political as with any meeting, and giving micromanaging managers something to do and something to report to their higher-ups (I've been part of teams where the "Scrum Master" and even "Product Owner" attends the standup...). Which is fine if that's the way the company works and the participants enjoy the ceremony for personal reasons, but there are no tweaks to the standup formula that makes teams more productive or functional. If I'm working on a solo project, nobody cares about the details of my progress besides the users I'm building it for. Whether this is an API for someone who is part of the standup, or a feature for someone in the company, I would communicate with them directly when needed. They would already be aware of my progress, and they usually don't need to be informed of it on a daily basis. If I'm stuck on something, then I would also communicate directly with the person who can help me. If I'm working on a team project, the team members would already be aware of the project status, whether that's via pull requests, issues, or direct communication (in-person, chat, email, etc.). The users of the project would be notified of the progress as needed in this case as well. So the standup ceremony is redundant for the few people familiar with the context, and completely useless for those who are not. The standup assumes that teams aren't communicating already, which is ludicrous. It's about time that the industry accepts that the Agile manifesto, while noble in principle, has been completely misunderstood and corrupted in all its implementations, and that the modern software development process is not an improvement over the Waterfall one it aimed to replace. To me the only process that makes sense is giving engineers autonomy, assuming they're self-sufficient and capable of making good decisions, and providing them with a very lightweight set of tools for collaboration (issue/task tracker, code review, chat, email, meeting, etc.). A process that works best for that team will emerge by consensus. Anything that's imposed from the top down or by cargo culting some process that worked for some other team will inevitably cause friction and be of little practical value.
- lepolas 1y ago
  As with many things, it depends on the team. Some teams and people really do seem to need some amount of daily direction to have confidence in the work they are doing, and that does have a meaningful impact on productivity. My bias is always to only participate in frequent recurring meetings as a last resort, but sometimes they seem to be necessary.
sirwhinesalot 1y ago
If everyone gives status updates that are either "Task is progressing as expected" or "I'm blocked as I mentioned on slack yesterday", then what is the point of the standup?
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Presenteeism check. Roll call, just like grade school. To be entirely unfair, I think that's always been the real reason for the standup "ceremony" to get a daily roll call because developers doing "agile" apparently can only be trusted if treated like school children. I feel that way because that's always been a part of the point of why it is called a standup: it's supposed to be as boiled down as just "progressing" or "blocked, who can help?" and it's supposed to be done standing up so that it is intentionally uncomfortable and everyone moves quickly to get back to their seats and get back to actual work getting done. I continue to advocate that standups are mostly useless and should just be a Slack message at most.
  - sirwhinesalot 1y ago
    That's my thinking too. At my workplace we shifted to longer 30min meetings every two days where people actually get to explain what is currently blocking them. Usually it'll already have been mentioned in the teams chat but the higherups aren't super active there and this lets them know how stuff is going and why. These meetings aren't really standups anymore though.
  - jghn 1y ago
    > always been the real reason It can't "always" have been the reason. The original intent of agile was that it was by the developers, for the developers. It's unlikely the originators of agile decided they needed to treat themselves like "school children"
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      Standups weren't in the original Agile Manifesto. Standups are most directly a Scrum-specific thing. Scrum was just one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, alongside Extreme Programming and some others. Scrum has always been the one with more "ceremonies" and more middle management involvement at each step, adding Product Owners and Scrum Masters as entirely new classes of middle management. Given how often teams devolve into "Scrumterfall", that sometimes seems like the "natural state" of Scrum. Scrum was designed to make Waterfall companies happier with Agile. Scrum has all these ceremonies and extra middle managers that are just Waterfall things done more often and closer to the engineering team. It's so very easy with hindsight to believe that Scrum was the "wolf in sheep's clothing" among the Agile Manifesto writers that didn't always believe in the goals of the Agile Manifesto. Especially "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools": just because they are called "ceremonies" doesn't make them magically stop being meetings and processes and tools. It's kind of worse than that because ceremonies implies rituals implies religious tones of control. I certainly feel like Standups are a bad idea designed to make Managers happy. The kind of middle managers, especially, that feel some command-and-control need to treat developers like "school children" because they don't understand what the developers actually do and don't really care. But maybe I've just had too many terrible "Scrum Masters" in my life (what a terrible term, what an awful job role, what a waste of middle management bureaucracy) and there's some "ideal" Scrum I've never seen where that isn't the case. (We probably would be far better off if more developers had listened more to the Extreme Programming side of the Agile Manifesto house, despite being confused/turned off by things like Pair Programming that made it "extreme". Though it was also things like Pair Programming that made Standups seem especially silly to XP, since you never not had someone to bounce blockers immediately off of in Pair Programming.)
ctkhn 1y ago
I've had them go 90 minutes because they branch off into tangents from people's updates and they become a solution session between one dev and our manager. Info is pretty silo'd (not required for security or anything, just bad management) so usually nobody else knows what's up with their ticket and manager is in other meetings all day so he never responds to dms to help on stuff. I've tried cutting people off to keep it moving and have been reprimanded about it, now I attend with camera off and do my dishes during the meeting. There is a value to standup in calling out "my PR needs eyes and nobody responded on slack" or "hey I'm blocked on X who wants to pair later" but outside that it's useless.
- jahsome 1y ago
  I get so many chores done during sprint ceremonies, including standup. Every session is a continuation of the same horribly inefficient planning/refinement/status update combo which doesn't effectively accomplish any of those things, and I've stopped caring because I just go to town with a mop.
- mcv 1y ago
  90 minutes is not a standup. Keep it brief. If something needs to be discussed in more detail, take it outside the standup with just the people interested in that issue. A good standup is often followed by a bunch of smaller meetings to discuss details or help people who are stuck.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    The absolute best thing about spending so long remote (I think I've been remote for the vast majority of the last 25 years) is that I can and will stand up for stand ups. This helps remind me to keep it brief and remind everybody else too. There's a guy literally stood up on screen, why are you discussing the minutiae ? It's awkward to do this in person (although after so long I'm in the habit enough that I will un-selfconsciously just stand up in a room full of people slouched at desks to attend the same meeting in person) so I can understand why people don't form the habit but I am quite sure it has been valuable.
mcv 1y ago
Interesting observation about Swedes. I'm Dutch, and I've noticed Swedes and Dutch people and culture are very similar in many ways, very egalitarian and everything, but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient. I've been part of several "too large" teams, and one in particular, with 20 people, I was really surprised it worked so well. Standup would take 20 minutes, everybody paid attention. There were informal subteams that would discuss details outside the standup. The most official subteam was the testers (first 2, later 4) who also controlled deployment, because everything had to go through them. Somehow it was a very efficient chaos. Not scrummy at all; technically we had sprints, but everybody ignored them and it was more kanban. Some features would take months, others would be done quickly. Some would restructure much of the code base. I've seen PRs that touched hundreds of files. Somehow it all worked and it worked very efficiently. We even took over another project from a team in the US that was going nowhere, and we managed to deliver it within their original deadline despite the other team wasting a year doing nothing. I still wonder how that team could work so well. We weren't all generalists; I was, but others would do only fronted, only backend, or spend most of their time thinking about taxonomies. The team did seem to foster a culture of friendly but brutal honesty without any punching down. Main tester and main backender would rib each other a lot. People eagerly took responsibility for fuckups. Everybody was considered an expert on something and nobody knew everything, so we'd consult each other a lot.
- deleted 1y ago
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- elktown 1y ago
  > but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient. Anecdotes are fragile; I've had the exact opposite experience, Dutch people taking offense for being direct when reviewing code.
  - mikrl 1y ago
    You’ve never heard the anecdata that the Dutch are notoriously stubborn? The offense could have been the Dutch person being direct about their stubbornness to feedback. Also possibly a point in favour of political speech vs directness. Much easier to politic a stubborn person than tell them to do something directly.
PeterStuer 1y ago
'This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask' In my experience anything that requires discipline is too brittle to last. You can argue it should not be so, but it is. Instead of discipline, an extrinsic force, robust motivation should be intrinsic, born from delivering a real value feeling to all participants.

piva00 1y ago

Not my experience working in Sweden for the past 10+ years. Likely that I had outlier experiences here but standups have always been short, the person leading it had complete autonomy to call out "I think this should be discussed after stand-up" whenever some discussion started to go on for a little longer (usually about 2-3 minutes is too long). The thing I noticed being culturally different is that you just don't cut off someone while they're speaking, you raise your point by politely asking for the space and sharing your opinion, and decisions about it are made through some consensus (which never failed when a discussion is going on for too long).

mcv 1y ago
It's definitely possible that culture matters. I wonder if there's something about American work culture that makes their standups so often dysfunctional. I'm Dutch and I have pretty good experiences with them in most projects.

cweld510 1y ago

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t working on the same things. The only real solution to that is to get people talking outside the standup.

marcosdumay 1y ago
Turns out that when you already have a meeting scheduled every single day, people (except for a few) just stop seeking each outer at other times. As much as this looks like a good thing superficially, dailies aren't fit for solving any kind of coordination problem, and that's the only meeting you will get.

deleted 1y ago

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cainxinth 1y ago

> More than anything, this sounds like no one was actually leading or moderating the standups. One of my clients hired a former U.S. Marine. I so enjoyed attending the meetings he ran. He managed the clock with ruthless efficiency.

alistairSH 1y ago
Tangent: Way back when I was in Scouts, the scout master was a USN missile submarine captain. He was a quirky guy, not the least of which was his ability to schedule things to ridiculous levels of detail... cross-country trip to go backpacking, and he'd have a lunch stop at 13:14, gas stop at 17:29, on base (we would stay in open barracks at military bases across the country) by 16:09. And wouldn't you know it... we were usually within a few minutes either way. And he managed to pack a lot of side-trips/value into the days we were on the road. It was really wild.
- pc86 1y ago
  I would never suggest people join the military to learn how to run a schedule correctly, but I will say that it's hard to find someone who was in the military - and borderline impossible to find someone who was senior in the military, especially a senior NCO - who is habitually late.
- harrall 1y ago
  I once did an international camping and backpacking trip like this where we had everything down to a minute. The key is to check your watch after you complete any activity. For example, you read that a 1000ft climb hike takes 2 hours and you do it in 2.5 hours. Do this over months and you gain the ability to make perfect estimates. Turns out that feedback loops are useful. Also applies to all other skills. Funny thing is I’m mostly a buy tickets to fly next week and wing it kind of person but I wanted to try it one time for kicks. Winging it is a whole different set of skills. Get good at both and planning becomes your jam.
watwut 1y ago
One problem with efficiently running standups is that ... they are the most useless meeting in the world. It is short, ok, but nothing whatsoever would change if it did not happened.

imiric 1y ago

From my experience as a SWE over the past ~15 years working in teams ranging from 10+ engineers in large companies doing daily in-person standups, to ~5 engineers in small remote-first companies doing daily videocall or async standups, and everything in between: the standup ceremony is a waste of everyone's time. Its only purpose is social/political as with any meeting, and giving micromanaging managers something to do and something to report to their higher-ups (I've been part of teams where the "Scrum Master" and even "Product Owner" attends the standup...). Which is fine if that's the way the company works and the participants enjoy the ceremony for personal reasons, but there are no tweaks to the standup formula that makes teams more productive or functional. If I'm working on a solo project, nobody cares about the details of my progress besides the users I'm building it for. Whether this is an API for someone who is part of the standup, or a feature for someone in the company, I would communicate with them directly when needed. They would already be aware of my progress, and they usually don't need to be informed of it on a daily basis. If I'm stuck on something, then I would also communicate directly with the person who can help me. If I'm working on a team project, the team members would already be aware of the project status, whether that's via pull requests, issues, or direct communication (in-person, chat, email, etc.). The users of the project would be notified of the progress as needed in this case as well. So the standup ceremony is redundant for the few people familiar with the context, and completely useless for those who are not. The standup assumes that teams aren't communicating already, which is ludicrous. It's about time that the industry accepts that the Agile manifesto, while noble in principle, has been completely misunderstood and corrupted in all its implementations, and that the modern software development process is not an improvement over the Waterfall one it aimed to replace. To me the only process that makes sense is giving engineers autonomy, assuming they're self-sufficient and capable of making good decisions, and providing them with a very lightweight set of tools for collaboration (issue/task tracker, code review, chat, email, meeting, etc.). A process that works best for that team will emerge by consensus. Anything that's imposed from the top down or by cargo culting some process that worked for some other team will inevitably cause friction and be of little practical value.

lepolas 1y ago
As with many things, it depends on the team. Some teams and people really do seem to need some amount of daily direction to have confidence in the work they are doing, and that does have a meaningful impact on productivity. My bias is always to only participate in frequent recurring meetings as a last resort, but sometimes they seem to be necessary.

sirwhinesalot 1y ago

If everyone gives status updates that are either "Task is progressing as expected" or "I'm blocked as I mentioned on slack yesterday", then what is the point of the standup?

WorldMaker 1y ago
Presenteeism check. Roll call, just like grade school. To be entirely unfair, I think that's always been the real reason for the standup "ceremony" to get a daily roll call because developers doing "agile" apparently can only be trusted if treated like school children. I feel that way because that's always been a part of the point of why it is called a standup: it's supposed to be as boiled down as just "progressing" or "blocked, who can help?" and it's supposed to be done standing up so that it is intentionally uncomfortable and everyone moves quickly to get back to their seats and get back to actual work getting done. I continue to advocate that standups are mostly useless and should just be a Slack message at most.
- sirwhinesalot 1y ago
  That's my thinking too. At my workplace we shifted to longer 30min meetings every two days where people actually get to explain what is currently blocking them. Usually it'll already have been mentioned in the teams chat but the higherups aren't super active there and this lets them know how stuff is going and why. These meetings aren't really standups anymore though.
- jghn 1y ago
  > always been the real reason It can't "always" have been the reason. The original intent of agile was that it was by the developers, for the developers. It's unlikely the originators of agile decided they needed to treat themselves like "school children"
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Standups weren't in the original Agile Manifesto. Standups are most directly a Scrum-specific thing. Scrum was just one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, alongside Extreme Programming and some others. Scrum has always been the one with more "ceremonies" and more middle management involvement at each step, adding Product Owners and Scrum Masters as entirely new classes of middle management. Given how often teams devolve into "Scrumterfall", that sometimes seems like the "natural state" of Scrum. Scrum was designed to make Waterfall companies happier with Agile. Scrum has all these ceremonies and extra middle managers that are just Waterfall things done more often and closer to the engineering team. It's so very easy with hindsight to believe that Scrum was the "wolf in sheep's clothing" among the Agile Manifesto writers that didn't always believe in the goals of the Agile Manifesto. Especially "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools": just because they are called "ceremonies" doesn't make them magically stop being meetings and processes and tools. It's kind of worse than that because ceremonies implies rituals implies religious tones of control. I certainly feel like Standups are a bad idea designed to make Managers happy. The kind of middle managers, especially, that feel some command-and-control need to treat developers like "school children" because they don't understand what the developers actually do and don't really care. But maybe I've just had too many terrible "Scrum Masters" in my life (what a terrible term, what an awful job role, what a waste of middle management bureaucracy) and there's some "ideal" Scrum I've never seen where that isn't the case. (We probably would be far better off if more developers had listened more to the Extreme Programming side of the Agile Manifesto house, despite being confused/turned off by things like Pair Programming that made it "extreme". Though it was also things like Pair Programming that made Standups seem especially silly to XP, since you never not had someone to bounce blockers immediately off of in Pair Programming.)

ctkhn 1y ago

I've had them go 90 minutes because they branch off into tangents from people's updates and they become a solution session between one dev and our manager. Info is pretty silo'd (not required for security or anything, just bad management) so usually nobody else knows what's up with their ticket and manager is in other meetings all day so he never responds to dms to help on stuff. I've tried cutting people off to keep it moving and have been reprimanded about it, now I attend with camera off and do my dishes during the meeting. There is a value to standup in calling out "my PR needs eyes and nobody responded on slack" or "hey I'm blocked on X who wants to pair later" but outside that it's useless.

jahsome 1y ago
I get so many chores done during sprint ceremonies, including standup. Every session is a continuation of the same horribly inefficient planning/refinement/status update combo which doesn't effectively accomplish any of those things, and I've stopped caring because I just go to town with a mop.
mcv 1y ago
90 minutes is not a standup. Keep it brief. If something needs to be discussed in more detail, take it outside the standup with just the people interested in that issue. A good standup is often followed by a bunch of smaller meetings to discuss details or help people who are stuck.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  The absolute best thing about spending so long remote (I think I've been remote for the vast majority of the last 25 years) is that I can and will stand up for stand ups. This helps remind me to keep it brief and remind everybody else too. There's a guy literally stood up on screen, why are you discussing the minutiae ? It's awkward to do this in person (although after so long I'm in the habit enough that I will un-selfconsciously just stand up in a room full of people slouched at desks to attend the same meeting in person) so I can understand why people don't form the habit but I am quite sure it has been valuable.

mcv 1y ago

Interesting observation about Swedes. I'm Dutch, and I've noticed Swedes and Dutch people and culture are very similar in many ways, very egalitarian and everything, but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient. I've been part of several "too large" teams, and one in particular, with 20 people, I was really surprised it worked so well. Standup would take 20 minutes, everybody paid attention. There were informal subteams that would discuss details outside the standup. The most official subteam was the testers (first 2, later 4) who also controlled deployment, because everything had to go through them. Somehow it was a very efficient chaos. Not scrummy at all; technically we had sprints, but everybody ignored them and it was more kanban. Some features would take months, others would be done quickly. Some would restructure much of the code base. I've seen PRs that touched hundreds of files. Somehow it all worked and it worked very efficiently. We even took over another project from a team in the US that was going nowhere, and we managed to deliver it within their original deadline despite the other team wasting a year doing nothing. I still wonder how that team could work so well. We weren't all generalists; I was, but others would do only fronted, only backend, or spend most of their time thinking about taxonomies. The team did seem to foster a culture of friendly but brutal honesty without any punching down. Main tester and main backender would rib each other a lot. People eagerly took responsibility for fuckups. Everybody was considered an expert on something and nobody knew everything, so we'd consult each other a lot.

deleted 1y ago
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elktown 1y ago
> but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient. Anecdotes are fragile; I've had the exact opposite experience, Dutch people taking offense for being direct when reviewing code.
- mikrl 1y ago
  You’ve never heard the anecdata that the Dutch are notoriously stubborn? The offense could have been the Dutch person being direct about their stubbornness to feedback. Also possibly a point in favour of political speech vs directness. Much easier to politic a stubborn person than tell them to do something directly.

PeterStuer 1y ago

'This requires discipline from both the person leading and the participants, but we're talking about a professional setting here, this isn't a big ask' In my experience anything that requires discipline is too brittle to last. You can argue it should not be so, but it is. Instead of discipline, an extrinsic force, robust motivation should be intrinsic, born from delivering a real value feeling to all participants.